# Codestral vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

> Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.3 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-nemotron-3-5-lightning
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in coding, where Nemotron 3.5 Lightning leads 39.6 to 26.9.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper at $0.06 / $0.16 per million input/output tokens, against $0.30 / $0.90 for Codestral.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 30.1 | 39.3 |
| Rank | 287 | 156 |
| Context | 256K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $0.06 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $0.16 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Codestral: 26.9 (#316)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.6 (#143)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1370 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |

## Reasoning

- Codestral: 19.1 (#244)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 25.7 (#128)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1335 |

## Math

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 34.7 (#156)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | — | 1355 |

## Knowledge

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 36.9 (#154)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | — | 1354 |

## Multilingual

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#175)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1292 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1356 |
| LMArena French | — | 1369 |
| LMArena German | — | 1280 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1213 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1233 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1257 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1321 |

## Instruction Following

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.8 (#166)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1317 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#160)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1312 |

## Writing & Preference

- Codestral: —
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#198)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1324 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1254 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1280 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1327 |

## FAQ

### Is Codestral better than Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.3 to 30.1 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Codestral or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper. It lists at $0.06 per million input tokens and $0.16 per million output tokens; Codestral lists at $0.30 and $0.90.

### Is Codestral or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better for coding?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning scores higher on coding benchmarks: 39.6 versus 26.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning does, with 262K tokens against 256K.

### How many benchmarks do Codestral and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18.